2024 Predictions on AI, The Election, X's Future and More

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0:34Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. Scott, it's our annual end-of-year predictions episode where we look into our crystal balls and make our best guesses about what we think will happen in the coming year, which is 2024. And we get a little help from some friends of Pivot who will give us their best predictions on what to expect in AI, media, politics, and more in 2024. As a reminder, in last year's predictions episode, you predicted that we'd hit peak personal genius. But 2023 is going to be just as whatever the metaverse or crypto, 2023 is going to be the year of AI.

1:16I think we've hit peak personal genius. I think we're going to see a lot of orange jumpsuits next year. I think Sam Bickman-Fried was kind of, I said this around Adam Neumann and I was wrong, But I think there's going to be real pushback on this notion that individuals are more important than institutions. I think people are just finally hit their breaking point. This year, we were on the money with predictions about activist investors, Chris Lick's departure from CNN, Amazon's downsizing of Alexa, and of course, our controversial predictions on the writers' and actors' strikes. Thanks. Also, I'll add that I called Linda Iacchino getting named CEO of Twitter, but she might be wishing I hadn't.

1:52And my Spidey Sense told me that we learned some sketchy things about the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, which we have. So let's see what 2024 will bring. To start things off, here's a prediction from Matt Bellany of Puck. Let's listen. Hi, Karen Scott. It's Matt Bellany from Puck and the Town Podcast. And I figured I would make a box office prediction because I know, Cara, you love going to the movies. We had a lovely time when we saw Mission Impossible together this summer. Next year, 2024, the box office is going to be down. And it's because of the strikes. Hollywood still has not recovered from COVID in theaters.

2:29And the strike was just absolutely debilitating for next year. This year is probably going to be down about 20 % from 2019. My prediction is next year is going to be down even more than 2023. And that is going to spell doom for a lot of these theater chains. I don't think the big ones like AMC or Regal will go into bankruptcy. But the smaller theater chains are in real trouble. It doesn't mean there won't be hits. There's going to be big movies next year. There's Inside Out 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3. There's another Mad Max. Dune is now in 2024. It's previously scheduled for this year. But it's all about volume.

3:11These theaters need a steady pipeline of Hollywood movies to make the money that they make, that they need to stay in business. And it's just not going to happen at the same level because we've had six months of production pauses. And all these movies are being pushed. Marvel, DC, everything is in disarray. So my prediction is 2024 is going to be a very bleak year at the box office. And there's going to be lots of ramifications. All right, that's a good one, especially coming from him, because he and I have had this argument about the death of movie theaters. He thought they had much more staying power.

3:48This is a big prediction from him, and I think he's 100 % right. Scott? The best thing that can happen to you in a business is success. The second best thing is it fails fast. And unfortunately for Hollywood and L.A.-based media, it's going to fail slowly for the next 20 years. And that is there will be Barbie and Oppenheimer summers that have a glimmer of hope. But over time, the regression line is going to be down into the right. I remember when I was a kid, I would sneak out of school early to go see a movie. If I ever had a date, it was a movie. I saw The Empire Strikes Back five times in a movie theater.

4:31And I think just consumer habits have just changed so dramatically that, you know, it's really weird where they're going. They're doing like these little artisanal theaters. Yeah, those are fine. It's not going to support the business. I wonder. It's an interesting story in the journal about Fathom, which does events like opera or they're doing all kinds of things. They're replaying like Dirty Dancing. You might want to see that in the theater, right? Those are small little good ideas for these theaters, like to do those kind of things. But it's not going to save this market. I actually did go see Mission Impossible with Matt.

5:05But I wanted to see that in the theater. But they're few and far between. And I now will only go to theaters that have reclining seats. Do you love our reclining seats? I love our reclining seat. Yeah, I pick. It's amazing. I do. One of the key things is my kids don't go to theaters. They just don't. They just really – they used to. But if you're drawing – I was thinking, okay, how do you gain insight into where you should allocate your finite financial and human capital? And I think a decent proxy is, does the business, if it's in the media or entertainment business, where does it make its money?

5:38And you want to find and invest in media companies that make their money based on how small the screen is. If they make their money or they get a lot of their income from a really big screen called a movie theater, don't get near it. If they make it on a smaller screen that's still quite big called a television, again, avoid it. But if they make their money off of putting data on a small, small screen called a phone, that's your bingo card. All right. All right. There you go. Good prediction. We don't think you went too far. I don't know. But you're right. That strike did hurt it very badly, no matter how you slice that.

6:14Okay, Scott, let's get to a prediction from our friend Bill Cohen, one of my favorite people. Hi, Karen. Scott, it's William D. Cohen here, best-selling author and founding partner of Puck and friend of Pivot, a delightfully happy friend of Pivot. So my prediction for 2024 is that finally the Twitter X debt will be sold by the eight banks that have been holding onto it for more than a year. It'll be sold at a discount of around 50 or 60 cents on the dollar. It'll fall into the wrong hands because Elon Musk will not do what he should do, which is buy the debt at a discount from the banks. But he won't do that.

7:04And it will fall into the hands of vulture investors, distressed investors, who will then rattle his cage endlessly for the next year or so until they take control of Twitter X away from Elon Musk because it basically can't pay its debts as they become due. It's a struggling financial disaster as we know it to be. And companies like IBM have stopped advertising in the platform. He will lose control of Twitter X and he will have flushed$44 billion, $24 billion of which was his own money down the tubes. One other tangential prediction for 2024 is that the Boston Red Sox, under their new GM, Craig Breslow, and I have to disclose that I'm a friend of John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox, will go from worst to first, will become the winners of the American League East in 2024.

8:09Happy 2024, Kara and Scott. I love you both. Bye. How much we love Bill Cohen. We love Bill Cohen. He's the best, isn't he? He really is. What an awesome, what a smart thinker he is. I don't always agree with him, but we really do. He's a great writer, too. Let's stop praising Bill Cohen for a second, though. This is a good prediction. Now, this is interesting. Yeah, okay, hold on. Let's just press pause. A prediction saying that movie theaters will decline in revenue. Okay, that's a prediction whose testicles have not descended. Sorry, Matt. Okay. Wow. You're really going out on a limb there, man.

8:40Don't be mean to our nice country. And then Bill shows up with testicles the size of Mars and says, Twitter, debt is going to be cured. It's going to be purchased by people who are going to bump Elon Musk into bankruptcy and take over Twitter. That's a prediction. Right or wrong, the key to predictions is not being right. It's inspiring or catalyzing a conversation. Anyways, I like that prediction a lot, whether it's right or wrong. All right. It probably won't happen, though. Okay, why? Tell me why. All right. Well, here's what the banks are doing. The banks, and I'm parroting Bill, he has a great, banks are not in the storage business, they're in the moving business.

9:13So the fact they have held onto this debt because they got caught in an interest rate environment that was accelerating. So all of a sudden they underwrote $12 billion worth of debt. Overnight it's worth 10 or nine, then eight and seven. And the last thing they want to do is once they sell it, they have to recognize that loss on an earnings call. And so they keep hoping, and this is the game they're playing. They keep hoping that Elon is going to show up and say, Elon has done the math here. He knows that the scenario bill just outlined is a real possibility. And so the banks are hoping that Elon shows up and says, okay, I'll give you 60 cents on the dollar.

9:47And the banks go, no, we're just going to let it out on the private market, Elon. And who knows who's going to end up with this debt. And they're hoping he's going to show up and overpay for it such that he doesn't have vultures pecking at his liver over the next 12 months in terms of distressed investors. If he doesn't show up, he's right. But I don't think it'll go into bankruptcy. Elon Musk has so much money with an impending IPO of Starlink, he would be able to make these interest payments in his sleep. And so as long as he makes the interest payments, he can pretty much ignore them. Yep. Yep.

10:18I don't know who'll buy them. I think he's right. The banks will offload this debt this year. It's taken a long time for them to do it. The question is, will he buy it? And will he get together a group of people who will give him more money to buy the debt? It's not that much money. I guess if it's$13, it would be$5 billion. I bet he could come up with that with his friends, him and his friends. I don't think his friends. I think his friends have been so burned. They paid such an enormous Elon tax. Well, he could come up with the money. I think he'll end up buying it. Yeah, he has the money. He has the money.

10:48Okay, Scott, now we have a prediction from Jen Psaki. Let's listen. Hi, Scott and Kara. It's Jen Psaki. So I know you guys are asking for predictions for 2024. Predictions are always hard. That's why you're asking for them. Here's mine. I think people always undervalue are still undervaluing the impact of abortion rights and the impact it could have for the Democrats on the ballot next year. And one of the smartest things that we should everybody should learn from for next year is the fact that on these states where there were ballot initiatives, there was big turnout. So my prediction is that abortion is going to be a bigger factor than most people are betting on.

11:26And the states that are smart enough to have abortion ballot initiatives are going to have higher turnout than other states. Oh, suck it to me. I think she's right. I think it's an enduring issue with women particularly, but I think young people, and I think it still sticks in the craw of everybody, what happened with Roe v. Wade, and they're worried about it. I think that's probably a very safe thing, and it's been a really winning issue for Democrats. And the Republicans are all over the place on this issue. Only Nikki Haley has a pretty good answer. The rest of them seem out of touch and confusing.

12:02Scott? It feels like it's already come to the fold. I mean, if you look at the elections around the nation, it's been a huge factor. And what's interesting is it feels like the ultimate self-inflicted wound across Republicans. And that is, I just read an article saying that abortions are actually up since Roe v. Wade was struck down. And at the same time, they're losing elections because this issue is obviously very important to people. So it feels like it was a kind of an unforced error on the part of, I guess it's the Supreme Court, not Republicans. Well, no, Republicans can't answer. You know, they sort of go, I interviewed Liz Cheney and I, you know, I was like, let's because she was thinking of running.

12:41And so I said, let's talk about something. Let's remind people who you are. And when I asked her about all kinds of issues, but then I got to abortion and she couldn't answer. She just was like, well, I, you know, empathy and. They don't want to answer. And she just couldn't, though. It was fascinating. And I have to say, she's as sharp as a tag. She's very controlled. And every answer is full paragraphs. She was wandering all over the place because they don't know what to say because they know it's a loser. I think just Nikki Haley is the only one who's had the most cogent answer, which gives her strength, I think.

13:17Speaking of which, if Nikki Haley were to become president, that would hands down be the watershed moment for the Republican Party of the last 50 years. Could be. Think about after all the accusations of the Democratic Party, you know, seeing everything through the lens of identity politics and being sponsors or advocates for the Me Too movement and kicking senators out for, you know, playing grab ass at fairs. And then they're the ones that elect the first female president. That would, oh, my gosh. From a brand move, if the Republicans were just thinking about what's good for the party for the next 10 years.

13:49Yeah, they're not thinking about that. But still, I'm just saying, theoretically, it'd be hard to imagine anything that would do more for the Republican Party brand than if they were the ones that elected the first female president. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. But she unfortunately keeps wandering down weird highways that she needs to go down to get that nomination, which she's not going to get. Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll hear from some more friends of Pivot and make our own predictions.

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15:20Okay, Scott, now we have a prediction on AI from Dr. Joy Bulamwini. Let's listen. Hi, Karen, Scott. This is Dr. Joy Bulamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League and the author of Unmasking AI, my mission to protect what is human in a world of machines. My prediction for AI in 2024 is that companies adopting AI systems that have been built on data taken without consent and compensation will face a growing number of class action lawsuits, and that companies concerned about the climate impact of training AI systems will start exploring green AI pipelines. Oh, that's interesting. That last one.

16:04I wonder what a green AI pipeline is. Because, you know, it's kind of similar to Bitcoin. I was just thinking that. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. The huge compute. That's one of the issues with why the big companies are so involved here is because the compute is so massive. I think she's right about lawsuits. I mean, this is where it's been going. And they've just been dragging information that they don't have rights to. And they're going to pay this time. Yeah, agreed. I wonder if they have the money, though, to strike a deal with something that's tantamount to what the record labels have done with some sort of omnibus rights organization that does big deals with big media companies.

16:41The biggest media companies, I mean, fortunately for them, it might be expensive, but it wouldn't be that difficult because media has been so consolidated that if you did deals with, say, 20 or 30 organizations, you might have 80 or 90 percent of the content that people want. You know, just people know Google just recently is paying Canada. They're sort of getting out of that fight over compensation. I think they'll just pay up now. I think they've decided it's just easier to do that than face these lawsuits. I ran into at a party I was just recently at as the guy who's head of content at OpenAI.

17:14He strikes deals with media companies. They did the AP deal, obviously. And I think you're going to see more of that. And as Barry Diller, he controls, I think, at Scripps. He's going to use the legal system because there's no laws in place. And that's what he's going to do. And that's what's going to him and others are going to do that. And individuals like Sarah Silverman, it's just inevitable that it's going to become class action. The green AI pipelines is true. And also the cost of doing a lot of this AI is going to be massive. But what I do think will happen, though, in contrast with Bitcoin, which I have never understood the fact that we, I mean, Bitcoin's electricity consumption is equivalent to the electricity consumption of Argentina.

17:55Yeah. The cost of mine Bitcoin. And I think, okay, a manufacturer, I mean, talk about an energy consumption disaster or what's the term, pool that just we dug ourselves. It didn't need to be dug. Like, it's never made any sense to me. And then the crypto Taliban claims that, well, actually, it's financing the marginal source of alternative energy because a lot of Bitcoin miners are placing them near, you know, wind and solar, which I always thought was total bullshit. Anyway, I don't think this will be as big an issue because the companies that are biggest in this are so heavily scrutinized and have so much capital that they will be able to put these server farms or whatever they're going to need near hydro facilities.

18:39I think this will be the greenest consumption of incremental power. I think these companies will get that right. Okay. Yeah, they're near it. They're not just solar. It's solar or hydro. They're not going to be excavating new coal mines. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Okay, Scott, now let's hear a prediction from Dr. Fei-Fei Li. Hi, Tara and Scott. This is Fei-Fei Li. I'm a Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, Denning Co-Director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the author of the book, The Worlds I See. My prediction for AI in 2024 is that the technology will continue to deepen and widen with a very impressive speed.

19:27We're going to see more multimodal large models beyond language into the domain of perception and world modeling. And we will also see AI continue to create a lot of discussion among the public and policymakers as we experience the messy impact of AI in our society and in our industry. Thank you. Well, the last part's obvious, I think. And she's at the Center for Human Centered AI, which has always been her push. The point she's making about beyond language of perception and world modeling is really important. Again, another thing I heard recently on some visits to a lot of tech people, this idea of what it could do beyond just, you know, give me what Scott would say if he was singing a rap.

20:22You know what I mean? That kind of stuff. But it's this world modeling of the way the world is and is a very big thing. And this is where I think you and I have talked about where we're really going and where the real benefits of AI are is the ability to take all this data and really begin to model things that humans can't do because of their ability. And then also to perceive things, pictures, photographs, and not just say what they are, but to understand and think, become like a brain. And I think she's talking about something very important here beyond these just models of data, of these language models.

20:59I just couldn't get past the fact that money has infected higher education. Did you see how she introduced herself? Yeah, Sequoia. Yeah, that's what she is. I'm the Sequoia professor of computer science. She's a legend. Do not insult her. She has to say. I'm not insulting her. I'm insulting the game. And by the way, I'm here to announce that I am now the new Cialis professor of marketing. You wish. I mean, for God's sakes. You wish. That's what they do? That's what they've said. We'll only give you this money if Professor Lee will, every time she introduces herself, say she's the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford.

21:30Let me read you the first sentence of my new book coming out in February. So it was capitalism after all. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Actually, Times first of the year should have been money. This is the year where money literally won everything. It always wins. Oh, not as much. When is it not the year of money? This has been the least productive legislative session in history. And as a result, you have money taking over the PGA. Let's actually go to what she said. She's a very famous and revered AI researcher. I think she's – everything I've read of her, she's very thoughtful. I think this was a big nothing burger.

22:03But anyways, go ahead. Anything? I don't know what she said here that's not obvious. You don't know – the world modeling thing is a big deal. Everyone is talking about the language models. This is – it's – you're not smart enough to understand what you just said. I'm not. I'm not. I don't know her. I'm sure she's wonderful. She's a pioneering AI. You're going to get in trouble for this, and you're going to deserve every bit of it. I'm sure she's great. I'm thrilled she's decided to partner with those really good folks at Sequoia. Oh, my God. Have you invested with Sequoia? I have. Aha. Okay, then.

22:33Yeah. So, now we know who is who. Okay. Just want to make sure about that. They backed me three times, Cara. All right. And this is the gratitude they get from me. Yeah, exactly. All right. You must have had a real tough time with Mike Morris. Awful people, Cara. Just saying. Okay. Okay, Scott. Yeah. Here's another one from our favorite, one of our favorite comedians, Mike Birbiglia. Let's listen. Hey, Karen, Scott. Love the show. My wife, Jenny, and I listen to every episode. Here's my prediction for 2024. Someone, some genius who I do not know comes up with something to replace text messages.

23:06There's too many, too many text messages. Like the other day, I woke up from a nap and it was just like, your uncle's in intensive care. Here's your brother's Wordle score. Your wife wants you to pick up paper towels at the store. And I'm just like, okay, thumbs up, thumbs down. Ha, ha, ha. No, ha, ha, ha. And I just like, I can't take it anymore. I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe like a flip phone that does Uber. I'm not in tech. That's my prediction. All right. Love you guys. I love my prediction. Yeah, so do I. By the way, the show, Old Man on the Pool, it's from the theater show, which was wonderful.

23:38Which you went to and I took my son to in London. Yeah, it's great. And it's on Netflix. I would recommend it. I'm going to watch it again. Also, I may note he was in a Taylor Swift video this year. Are you kidding? Yeah. He played her son. He played her son. KFC has a Taylor Swift special. It's two long skinny legs and a left wing. All right. I have so much respect for her. It's morphed into objectification. Just so you know, anyone objectified, it's a function of immense respect. It never morphs into objectification. Let me get back to Mike's question. I agree. Text messages is now like email.